


A cup of joe and pokémon go

by Sectionladvivi



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Characters Playing Pokemon GO, Coffee, Crushes, F/M, Light Angst, M/M, Negan Being Negan (Walking Dead), POV Rick Grimes, Single Parents, Slow Build, Teenage Rebellion, You go Glenn Coco
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-10-06
Packaged: 2019-07-01 19:33:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15780648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sectionladvivi/pseuds/Sectionladvivi
Summary: Rick Grimes is a single dad whose son resents him and infant daughter won't stop throwing up on his work apron, which he wears because he works at a coffee shop, which is what happens when you have a brief mental break after your wife's sudden traumatic death and get fired from your relatively cushy corporate job.The only way he can hope to bond with his son is through a mobile app about catching and collecting 'pokémons'. The only way he can hope to catch the most elusive pokémons is through the aid of a customer who is as cutthroat in the world of Pokémon Go as he is as a CEO.





	1. Ditto

**Author's Note:**

> This is my 2nd work in the fandom! Be nice

Rick Grimes’ day started at midnight.

Honestly it felt like his day began before the last even had a chance to end, but call it even, split it there. Midnight.

1 AM, Judith started crying, sure as any clock.

She was easy to get back to sleep, she wasn’t fussy, but then she liked to be up at least once again before 4.

4 AM was breakfast and a shower. Most of the time he remembered to shave. He usually made an effort at a healthy lifestyle, he liked to do that at least once a day. Grapefruit for breakfast. He always made Carl lunch in a brown paper bag; he wasn’t sure why, he was convinced Carl didn’t eat them. His mind always conjured up a mental image of Carl sitting outside the school smoking cigarettes and slugging energy drinks during his lunch period.

He put the bag lunch in the fridge and scribbled a note for the morning nanny (‘ _Judith elephant onesie in laundry room, please wash_ ’), stuck it on the fridge next to the magnets (letters, which he assumed Carl had arranged into the word BUTTMUNCH), and checked in on them one last time. Judith was fast asleep. He kissed her on the head.

Carl was facing the wall, asleep, or awake and ignoring him. Rick stood in the doorway for a minute.

The room was decked out in posters for movies and musicians Rick couldn’t tell apart. The carpet was still stained from where Carl had spilled spaghetti about a year ago; every time Rick saw it, he was embarrassed that he hadn’t gotten around to replacing the carpet yet. There was an out of tune bass guitar propped up in the corner, a broken skateboard, and a big desk and a computer that was supposed to be for school.

Nothing about the room had changed since Lori’s death, except that Rick felt ashamed to enter it.

He didn’t wake Carl to say good-bye, just shook his head and went to work.

He ran into the nanny right as he stepped out the door. She was the tiny blonde daughter of a neighbor, who wanted to be a nurse or something; he had missed the details in her chattering about exactly why she was perfect for the position. He had caught ‘cheap’ and ‘available’ and he had lived in this neighborhood long enough that he trusted her father and so he trusted her. Being talkative in the morning was her only real sin--but it was a significant one.

“Morning, Beth.”

“Morning, Mr. Grimes!”

Beth liked to stage whisper, as if they weren’t the only two people awake on the street at this hour. He checked his watch; it was inching up on 4:45.

“She sleep okay?” asked Beth. She was bright-eyed, holding her notebooks tucked to her chest, wearing boots and capris, looking more like she was ready to do field research on chimpanzees than sit around and read Dr. Seuss to a six month old.

“Yep, she slept fine. Note on the fridge. Food in it. Take whatever you like--just not the grapefruit. I have to go; anything happens, you call me, okay?”

He had to be at the coffee shop by 5, because they opened at 6.

He got there at 5:15.

“Seriously?” asked Glenn, who was holding the door open for him. Glenn was always there first, even when Rick wasn’t late. Glenn was already wearing an apron and wafting pastry smells.

“Don’t start,” said Rick. He came in through the alley door, shucked down his bag, and went to wash his hands. “I covered for you last Saturday, remember?” he said over his shoulder.

“Oh yeah.” Glenn stood behind him with his arms crossed, looking discouraged. Glenn Rhee was the only thing keeping Rick from feeling wholly sorry for himself, because at least he wasn’t juggling double majors, two jobs, _and_ a crush on a girl who couldn’t remember his name even when he was wearing a name tag, even after Glenn had memorized her order perfectly. Double latte, almond milk, sugar free vanilla. Rick had it memorized too, because he heard Glenn rehearsing it rapidfire under his breath every time Maggie Greene walked in that door.

The worst part was that Glenn didn’t even get it right. The first time he had tried greeting her with a suave, “Double latte, soy milk, sugar free vanilla?”, Rick had almost died of embarrassment for him.

Maggie had stared at Glenn, who had realized he had made a mistake and back-tracked in the worst possible way. “Or, not sugar free? Just regular vanilla? I didn’t mean— you don’t _need_ sugar free, it’s not like you’re fat, or anything, not that there’s anything wrong with—”

And Rick had taken over, with a “Almond milk, right, Maggie?” and let Glenn go contemplate suicide with a bagel knife in the back.

Maggie was nice. She was Beth's older sister, though Rick hadn't known her as well; she had already been in college when they moved across the street. Now she interned at one of the tech startups that sustained the coffee shop, sometimes came in with complicated drink orders written in blissfully clear handwriting, didn’t make small talk, and always tipped exactly 20%. Occasionally she and Rick swapped a nod to acknowledge that they knew each other.

Glenn was in love with her. It didn’t matter how many times she called him ‘Steven’. That was his own fault for having bad handwriting on his nametag, he insisted.

Rick finished washing his hands and pulled on the apron, drying his hands on the front. Something about his reflection didn’t look quite right. It wasn’t the bloodshot eyes.

Glenn raised his eyebrows when he turned around.

“Did you forget to shave again?”

Dammit.

—

By the time the doors opened, there was already a line. It was a Monday, and if the 9-to-5ers had their way, the coffee shop would open at 4. Rick knew most of their faces by now and most of their orders, but none of their names. He didn’t have to; they rattled off their names and orders at the same time. He and Glenn alternated taking them down, making drinks, calling out names, and handing off beverages. It was a soothing rhythm once you managed to rise above the fog of corporate stress. Even half a year removed from that grind, Rick still had the feeling that he should be grabbing a coffee and dashing off himself.

He managed to catch a breather around 7:45, and checked his phone. He had a text from Beth. ‘ _Dropped C off at school. Onesie is in the wash. Judith says hi. :)_ ’

“Hey Rick, check it out!” Glenn. Rick turned and looked at whatever Glenn was showing him on his phone: some animation of a pink blob.

“What is it?”

“It’s a Ditto,” said Glenn, as if that was supposed to mean something.

“Okay,” said Rick.

“I need it for my research task,” said Glenn. “I’m so close to catching Mew.”

Oh. “This is that game, right? That pokémon thing?” He vaguely remembered Carl talking about it. That was just one of many things Carl talked about these days that were beyond Rick’s comprehension. He just rolled with it; he was always happy when Carl talked to him at all.

“Yeah,” said Glenn. “Dude, you should totally download it.”

“I’m not sure my phone will run that thing,” said Rick. All he used his phone for was texting Beth and Carl and sometimes playing Tetris on his break, sitting in the alleyway drinking a coffee of his own.

“You should totally download it,” Glenn said again. He insisted, “Here, let me see your phone.”

“Ahem,” said Maggie Greene, standing at the counter. Glenn dropped the phone.

And that was why Rick Grimes got a new phone.

—

“Mm hm,” he said, agreeing with everything the sales girl was telling him without an ounce of understanding. “That sounds good.”

“...and that plan includes unlimited text, talk, and data, and a 15 gigabtye hotspot.”

“Sure,” said Rick. “Say, does this uh… play that pokémon game?”

She blinked at him. Probably before she could stop herself, she looked him up and down. He was immediately hyperaware of his disheveled Dad aesthetic, and realized he had never taken off his nametag.

“Well, yeah,” she said.

“Great,” said Rick, and he bought the phone and got the fuck out of there.


	2. Kangaskhan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cuz i get a little bit kangaskhan  
> don't want you to get it on with nobody else but me

_‘Remember to stay alert at all times. Be aware of your surroundings.’_

Rick leaned on the counter just out of view of customers. He wanted to be sure no one could look over his shoulder and see that a very grown man was playing a game most popular among (he had looked it up) 18 to 29 year olds.

He was not thinking of the silence over dinner the night before, when Carl had rapidfire inhaled Judith’s weight in mac n cheese and bolted for his room before Rick could ask about his day, leaving him to chat about the day’s events with Judith instead. It wasn’t like he expected Carl to be spilling his hopes and dreams at every meal, but “A ‘Hey’ or a ‘God I hate algebra’ would be nice, is all,” was what he told Judith over a spoonful of pureed peaches.

Maybe he would have gotten more than a grunt and dodged eye contact out of Carl if he had mentioned pokémons.

_‘Remember to stay alert at all times. Be aware of your surroundings.’_ struck Rick as ominous.

“Hey, Glenn. Anyone ever die playing this? Crossing the road, that kind of thing?”

“Oh yeah.” Glenn practically fell out of the kitchen to answer his question. “Dude, this one guy. He broke into somebody’s house to catch a pokemon, they thought he was an intruder. Got shot. Saw it on the news.”

“He _was_ an intruder,” Rick pointed out.

“What?”

“If he broke into their house.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Rick looked back down at the loading screen and its warning. It had never occurred to him that a game on a phone could be dangerous. Texting, Facebook, sure. He knew about Tide pods and Snapchats. But Pokémon? Should he have had a talk with Carl about it, he wondered? Some variant on stranger danger, or looking both ways before you cross the road?

“This one guy fell off a cliff,” said Glenn, leaning on the counter, thoughtfully chewing his thumbnail. “He didn’t die though. Well, I don’t think he died.”

At least there were no cliffs around town for Carl to fall off of.

Rick clicked OK, didn’t read the terms and conditions, and punched through a bunch of dialogue with some white-haired doctor type.

“That’s professor Willow,” said Glenn. He loomed over Rick’s shoulder with the enthusiasm of someone between 18 and 29 years old. “See, the point of the game is to collect Pokémon so you can help him with his research. You complete research to something something something…” Rick had tuned him out. He kept clicking through. When did the game start? “Hey, whoa,” said Glenn. “Dude, go back, you accidentally picked the female avatar.”

Rick turned and looked Glenn in the eye, looked at him like he was about to pull into Rick’s private parking space and no way in hell that was gonna work out for him. Slight squint. Head tilted.

“You got a problem with that?”

“No,” said Glenn, backpedaling, almost backing up right into the mini fridge of expensive juices and kombucha. Rick clapped him on the shoulder.

“Relax,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what you pick, does it?”

“Well, no.”

“Then, I am going to play with the female avatar,” said Rick, tapping his screen. “To teach Carl a lesson... about respecting women.”

“Okay,” said Glenn weakly.

Rick tapped around more until he was satisfied with the avatar’s colors, which he changed back and forth multiple times mostly because he was entertained by his ability to do so. Then the screen went blue, and three of what he could only assume were the pokémon popped up around his avatar.

“I’m supposed to catch these, right?”

“Those are the starter Pokémon. You can only catch one,” said Glenn. “It’s an important choice because all of them represent—”

“I like this one,” said Rick, tapping one at random. The phone switched to a view of the coffee shop through the camera; surprised, he swiveled, and there bobbing by the cinnamon rolls was… “It's a little green plant guy.”

“That’s Bulbasaur,” said Glenn. “Do you know how to catch it?”

“Sure, yeah.” He’d seen Carl do it a hundred times, knew exactly what that confident finger flick looked like. He flipped the pokéball. “Hmm. Dropped it.” He tried again. “Okay… where did he go?”

“You’ve got to— swivel around again.” Glenn was trying his best. “You’re in AR mode.”

“What?”

“It’s like, the camera mode. You need to get him back in frame—”

Someone dinged the bell. A fried looking intern was standing at the counter looking defeated by the week. “I’ve got it,” said Rick, starting to put his phone down, but Glenn shoved it back into his hands.

“No!” he insisted. “It’s your first Pokémon. It’s _important_. You get that— I’ve got this.” Rick had never seen him so intense, except in those white-knuckled pourovers when Maggie was waiting on him.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’ll catch it.”

Glenn went to the counter, and Rick lined his phone up with the cinnamon rolls once again. There it was. The Bulbasaur. The first of many pokémons. He flipped the pokéball again, with purpose.

And again.

And again.

“Did you get it?” Glenn loomed nearby, shaking a carton of soy milk. He craned his neck to look at the screen.

Rick squinted at him. “Don’t you have some milk to steam?”

Glenn beat it, and Rick finally succeeded in hitting the circle. The pokéball bounced, bounced, and… ‘Gotcha!’ read the screen. The pokémon was his.

He felt a brief moment of elation, and for a second, thought he had won a point as a dad. He didn’t understand the game -- he barely understand Carl’s algebra homework -- but he thought he was finally starting to understand the draw of flicking pokéballs at imaginary gremlins for hours.

“Hey, Glenn.” He held the phone out as Glenn passed toting a fresh bag of bagels, screen turned to display his prize.

“Nice!” said Glenn, extricating an arm to give him a thumbs up. “That’s one down, three hundred and seventy five to go.”

“...how many?”

“Three hundred and seventy five. There are three hundred and seventy six out, total. I think.” Glenn started to count on his fingers, looking at the ceiling as he tried to remember. “Yeah, because there are three generations out now. But you can’t just go out and catch all of those. Some of them are raid exclusive.”

“Raid exclusive?”

“Yeah, you have to go battle for them and stuff. And some are regionals-- like Kangaskhan. You can only get those in Australia.”

“Australia.”

“And some, like the baby forms, you can only hatch from eggs. And some are so rare, you basically never see them except on community days, and you have to basically block out a whole Saturday afternoon if you want to catch enough shinies _and_ evolve to get the special movesets—”

“Glenn?”

“Yeah?”

Rick was rubbing his forehead. “Was that— was that, what you asked me to cover you for? Last Saturday? When your mom was sick?”

Glenn tried to match Rick’s stare. It was useless. He dropped his gaze “I have to…” He gestured pathetically. “Bagels.” And he made his guilty, mincing escape to stack bagels on the display counter.

Rick screwed his thumbs into his temples, then looked back down at his phone and the little green thing gently bobbing its head.

Three hundred and seventy six?

He wondered exactly how many he would have to catch before Carl would have a conversation with him again.


	3. Mewtwo

He forgot about pokémons for a few days, because trouble came and shoved its foot up the ass of Rick Grimes’ life once more.

Beth greeted him at the door holding Judith, and looking as guilty as if she had been the one to break the windows of the principal’s car. She was nearly tearful when she said, “Judith was great today. We went for a walk in the park.” The look on her face was tragic. “This old couple was there, they said she was adorable.”

“Thank you, Beth,” he said, trying to bury his emotions somewhere they were incapable of influencing his actions. He took his baby and handed Beth a wad of squashed bills he hoped was what he owed her, because he had forgotten, and knew she was far too sweet to correct him if he had it wrong. That was a galling thought, that a nice kid might take a hit to her college fund because a frazzled dad couldn’t get his shit together. It was also galling because it felt like charity— like that time he caught Maggie slipping about thirty bucks in ones into his tip jar. He’d had to pretend not to notice, because he didn’t want to make it obvious that he _knew_ how obvious it was that his life was a mess.

“It’s no problem, Mr. Grimes,” she said, and paused on his doorstep with a look of ‘should I say something?’ “I don’t think he meant to do it,” she said quickly. “Not really.” And she darted off his porch, notebooks tucked to her chest, crossing under the streetlight to her house.

Rick stood a minute keeping an eye out, until he saw the light go on in their kitchen, then shook his head and shut the door behind him.

He stepped into the kitchen; Carl was sitting at the table waiting for him, not looking particularly guilty, not particularly repentant. Rick looked at him, and when the right thing to say didn’t come immediately to mind, he delayed by checking the mail on the counter. Bills. Bills. Credit card offer.

Beth had gotten the groceries, as she usually did on Thursdays. He could tell she had been frazzled when putting them away, because when he opened the fridge the carton of eggs was upside down. He righted it. He took out two ginger ales. He put the ginger ales on the table, grabbed a bowl, put the bowl on the table, took a bag of chips, and opened the bag and upended it into the bowl.

Rick trashed the chip bag and pulled up a chair.

For a few minutes he and Carl sat in silence eating chips. Judith was dozing off on his shoulder after her long day. His day had been long, too. He felt simultaneously dead on his feet, and wide awake. He still didn’t know what he was supposed to say. The silence grew long; Carl must have thought he was gearing up for a lecture.

“I know what you’re gonna say.” That made one of them. “That it was stupid. And I know. It was stupid.”

Rick didn’t argue. “Did you… did you do it on purpose?” He was still trying to understand exactly what had happened.

“Well, not at first,” said Carl. “They were all saying ‘go on, do it’, you know? So I pretended I was going to, and then, it just happened.”

Rick rubbed at the headache beginning to pulse above his eyebrows. “Okay,” he said. “And then you just decided… to break the rest of them?”

“It makes sense,” said Carl. _No, it does not._ “She was already gonna have to take her car in for one window, and I was already going to be in trouble.”

“How—” he said. “How does that make sense?” _God give me patience._

“If I had freaked out, or stopped halfway through, everyone would have seen it. You can’t back down, Dad.” Carl said it like he was dictating the law of the jungle. “I know it’s stupid, but you can’t. That’s high school. Remember when you told me about those guys at your old job, how they were all just sharks, circling, waiting for the right moment? It’s like that. Everybody wants you to be weak. But one thing like that— like, you break the windows on a car, and that’s four years of nobody bothering you. Everybody thinks you’re a badass. That's a problem solved, almost.” Seeing the look on his father’s face, Carl doubled down. “It’s really not that big of a deal! Principal Monroe’s really nice, her insurance is covering everything, I just have a lot of detention. Like, a lot of detention.”

Carl pulled out the one card no parent had a defense against: “It could be way worse. I could be stealing my aunt’s percocet, like Maisy.

Rick flattened his hand over his face. Muffled, he said, “If I buy you a car, will you stop hanging out with kids who steal their aunt’s pain medication?”

“You want me to stop being friends with a girl whose life sucks so hard she steals percocet?”

Rick wanted to go lie facedown on his pillow and suffocate. He dropped his hand to the table. “What am I supposed to do here, Carl? Take away your guitar, that you don’t play? Take away your phone?”

“You can’t take away my phone!” For the first time, Carl sounded like a teenager and not a burgeoning philosophy major. “There’s an EX Raid this weekend at the Sprint store, and I don’t have Mewtwo yet!”

“Right,” said Rick, remembering. “Pokémon Go.”

“I _know_ you think it’s stupid,” said Carl. “And yeah, it’s just a dumb game. But I—”

Something stopped him. Carl looked away, and whatever emotional truth had been rising fell flat. The gap widened between them once more.

Rick couldn’t have said anything wrong already, could he? He had barely said anything at all.

“I’m not gonna make you give me your phone,” he said. “Just give me that broken skateboard.”

“The skateboard?” repeated Carl.

“Yeah. It’s confiscated. Consider yourself punished. Now, go write an apology letter, and I mean a good one. You’re going to give Principal Monroe that apology, in person, and then you’re going to offer to mow her lawn any day of the year, and then you’re going to mow our lawn, and then you’re going to mow Hershel’s lawn for making Beth late getting home. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Carl. “I understand.” He didn’t look as abashed as he probably should have, and he probably wasn’t being punished nearly enough for what he had done, but Rick thought Beth was probably right; Carl hadn’t meant to do it. _‘He’s just a kid,’_ Lori would have said, with endless patience, the patience he never had. When he tried to be patient, he just felt like he was sitting on his hands.

Carl took the last of the chips to his room and Rick downed the rest of his ginger ale. He went to put Judith down for the night and returned to the kitchen to rinse out the bottles and put them aside for the recycling.

He rested his arms on the countertop for a moment. On impulse, he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and fired up the game.

When the warning about safe playing disappeared, there stood his avatar in a sea of green and dark blue sky. He waited for pokémons to spawn, but nothing happened. A message popped up at the top of the screen:

‘GPS signal not found’.

Typical.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I edited the first chapter a little to show that Maggie and Beth are related, demented_queen pointed out that I didn't say so. Thanks everyone for the comments so far! I promise Negan will show up soon. I wanted to update before I went to the movies and I'm already late lol. Next chapter will be longer :)


	4. Megan

Glenn didn’t even try to talk to him the next day. He took one look at Rick’s expression, pulled a nonverbal ‘yikes’, and left him alone to go line up croissants in the display case.

Rick prepped for the morning in near-dark, slapping half-off labels on day old pastries, reassembling the espresso machine parts he’d cleaned the night before, and sanitizing the already sanitized surfaces. It was quiet except for the soft mechanical sounds and the hissing of the steam wands. It was probably going to be the most peaceful part of his day. When it was fifteen minutes to open, he was reluctant to go flick on the lights and turn on the music. If Glenn, who had been procrastinating studying for a test all week, hadn’t put so much effort into the playlist, Rick would have turned it right back off. The plucky ukulele did not fit his mood.

The morning rush was the usual parade.

There was a fresh influx of lost-looking corporate types, in town for some kind of conference. Rick had to say ‘self serve coffee is to the left, beside the cliff bars’ so many times he lost count, and at one point actually had to come around the counter to walk a customer over and point at it.

When he returned, Glenn was in trouble.

At the front of the line was a man Rick didn’t recognize, definitely not a regular. In a room full of business-formal, he was a sore thumb of business casual, emphasis on the casual, and breezy about it in the way only upper management could get away with. He wore a dark jean, a florid skinny tie… and a leather jacket. A middle finger to corporate dress standards if ever there was one.

He wasn’t clean shaven, either, which made him and Rick the only scruffy ones in the room. (The sad thing Glenn was nursing above his upper lip didn’t count.)

The man was leaning on the counter in a very self assured way, and he was grinning. _Why?_ It was 7 AM. Even Glenn’s customer service smile didn’t kick in until 8.

“Sorry,” Glenn was saying. He had crumbs on his apron and a defeated expression. A bear claw and a ceramic plate were lying broken on the floor. Rick followed the trail of what had happened: a dropped plate, a knocked over mop, and the whole stack of day-old brownies scattered on the floor. One of them had already been stepped on.

“Wow,” said the man. “This is _really_ not your day, is it?”

The words themselves were sympathetic, but there was nothing sympathetic about his tone, or that smile.

“I’m really sorry,” said Glenn again. “I’ll get you another one.”

“You _sure_ you can handle that— Glenn?” The man read his nametag and zeroed in. “Glenn… yeah, that sounds about right. Glenn, I'm just curious, who ties your shoes in the morning? Or do you just wear those little sneakers with the velcro straps on them? You know. Like for babies.”

Glenn didn’t say anything in his defense. He looked like a slapped baby deer.

“I’ve got this, Glenn.” Rick came around the counter and put a hand on his shoulder.

The man looked at him, looked at Glenn, and his grin widened. He pointed at him.

“This must be the shoelace-tier.”

Glenn beat a thankful retreat, taking the broken plate and tarnished bear claw with him, and Rick rested his elbows on the countertop and let the full force of his shitty week come out through his eyes.

He had to look in the mirror every day, he knew what was there. Lori had once affectionately said that he had ‘resting chainsaw massacre face’. ‘He’s not shy,’ she’d loved to say at work functions. ‘He’s just hungry.’ That resting chainsaw massacre face was very effective at scaring people out of his parking space, sending hooligans slouching out of his park, and especially at making snotty customers change their attitudes and find a different coffee shop.

This man scanned Rick up and down, settled on his face, and smiled. He leaned into it.

“Hi,” he said.

“Can I help you?”

“You sure can,” he said, eyes flicking down to his nametag. “‘ _Rick_ ’.” He pronounced his name with a very hard K. “You make coffee here, Rick?”

Something in Rick Grimes was not going to grovel today.

He grabbed a cup. “Let me guess,” he said. “You want a pumpkin spice latte, and you want it iced, no whip, with an extra shot, made with low-fat milk, because swimsuit season is coming up, and you’re watching your figure.”

The man’s smile faded, and when his face turned serious, there was something very hard and nasty in it.

There was something dangerous there. Maybe not chainsaw massacre, but some kind of murder.

“That,” he said. “Is exactly what I want.”

And then he was smiling again, like he’d never allowed the scary glimpse behind the curtain.

Rick stared at him for a moment. It took a minute of too-sustained eye contact to be absolutely sure that yes, that was the drink he was going to be making. All right. Bluff called. A little disgruntled, he asked, “Name?”

“Negan,” said the man, and proceeded to spell it for him, leaning way too far over the counter than was polite, so he could ensure Rick got every letter. “That’s N, E, G, A, N. Got it?”

Rick wordlessly rotated the cup so he could see it.

“Good job, Rick.” Negan grinned. “I guess not everyone who works here is totally incompetent.” He didn't say it in the way the average asshole customer said that kind of thing. It wasn’t snide, and it definitely wasn’t passive aggressive, because there was nothing passive about him. His antagonism was about a subtle as a baseball bat. He had gotten a reaction once, and he was transparently curious to see what would happen if he kept pushing buttons.

Who had the energy for mind games, Rick had to wonder, again, _at 7 in the morning?_

Another time of day, Negan might have gotten the reaction he wanted, but now, Rick just stared him in the eye, ice cold. “Anything else I can do for you?”

The man leaned back a little, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and grinning still, shook his head. “Rick,” he said. “You are making this too goddamn easy.”

He pulled out his wallet, paid with a twenty, and, making direct eye contact, put all of the change in the tip jar with the air of a man slipping his money into a stripper’s garter.

—

Rick assembled the ridiculous drink, chafing under his own standards for his behavior. The kind of standards that made him think things like _‘How can you expect Carl to do X, if you do Y?’_ on an endless loop, and didn’t seem to make much concrete difference in whatever Carl was doing these days. He checked his phone in the fruitless way he did every hour, making sure there was nothing from Beth, not bothering to hope if there was anything from Carl. He hadn’t opened that pokémon game all day, but he was tempted to now, if only to delay finishing the drink and somewhat inconvenience his new least favorite customer.

‘GPS signal not found’.

_Seriously?_

Making a mental note to ask Glenn how to fix it, Rick popped the lid on the drink and turned back towards the counter. Impulse stopped him.

It was probably the same kind of impulse that had made Carl bust those windows.

He took his marker and added another line to the name. It now read:

MEGAN.

Negan had melded back into the sea of caffeine-seekers when he reached the counter. Before he could call him up, a woman pressed forward. “Excuse me— where is the self serve coffee?” Rick went around to show her.

That was why Glenn was the one who picked up the drink and called out, “Pumpkin spice latte, for Megan?”

Rick didn’t make it back in time.

When he got back around the display case, there was Glenn standing at the register looking trapped, and there was Negan, holding the drink, turning it around stony-faced to read Rick’s scrawl. "'Megan'," he read out loud.

Rick’s head reminded him of what Carl had said the night before. _‘Remember when you told me about those guys at your old job, how they were all just sharks, circling, waiting for the right moment?’_

Negan smiled, showing every one of his teeth. He unwrapped a straw and punched it through the lid, aggressively enough that Glenn actually flinched. Negan found his moment with relish.

“I’d like to speak to your manager,” he said.


	5. Weedles

Glenn got fired.

Rick barely had time to be pissed on his behalf before Glenn admitted he had mostly been working there to see Maggie, and that he had another job lined up already. Delivering pizzas.

Glenn still came around most days to study, and to perpetually try to work up the courage to ask Maggie for her number, so honestly Rick’s days weren’t much changed. It was the mornings that were different. There was no one to help open on the grim mornings before the sun came up. Rick left the music off until opening, because it felt strange to be listening to it by himself, without Glenn telling him 'fun music fact, this bassist only has four fingers' or 'I saw these guys live last summer!'.

Rick found himself opening the pokémon game more and more. Glenn had fixed the GPS for him, in an out-the-door, bittersweet way, saying, “Try connecting to the wifi,” in the same tone you might wish a comrade safe travels in war times.

Rick connected to wifi, and a world of squiggly little creatures and spinning ‘pokéstops’ opened itself up to him.

There was a ‘pokéstop’ on the coffee shop itself--a little blue hub you could tap on and spin for items: pokéballs, potions, berries. Not knowing what most of it was for, Rick just spun the pokéstop constantly because he didn’t have anything else to do, and lobbed pokéballs at whatever creature spawned nearby. He quickly accrued a small legion of worms (‘weedles’) and birds (‘pidgeys’ and ‘natus’). He had no idea what he was doing, but he managed to hit level 4 by the time they found a new barista.

Daryl Dixon did not make a good first impression.

The first day, Rick met him at the parking garage, and when Daryl got out of his car, a dense cloud of weed smell followed him. Daryl snapped, “It’s my brother’s car,” before Rick could even say anything.

He was defensive in an aggressive way. Fidgety. Restless. Always moving around, like a big cat pacing in a zoo enclosure. He didn’t talk much. He took direction on how to work the equipment in silence, and Rick assumed Daryl wasn’t paying attention, until he neatly broke down the components of the espresso machine and put them back together with speed and ease. So, he was mechanically minded. That was the only thing he seemed to have going for him.

Everything about Daryl Dixon said ‘burnout’. His hair was long, he had a couple of bad tattoos, and he was so abrasive Rick didn’t know how he’d made it through the interview process, let alone gotten the job. Daryl didn’t enunciate, and most of the time, he didn’t talk at all.

Every time Rick saw his car pull up late, headlights busted, beer cans spilling out the open door, he thought ‘I hope that isn’t Carl in ten years’ and then spent the rest of the morning working in silence with Daryl, feeling bad that the thought had crossed his mind.

He didn't think they were going to get along at first. One morning, about a week into his training, Daryl was taking out the trash. Rick was sitting on the alley stoop mindlessly catching weedles. On his way out the door, Daryl glanced down and asked, “What’s that?”

Rick looked up from his weedles. He and Daryl made eye contact, and realized in unison that they were going to talk about something that wasn't work. They were both dubious. Rick might have evaded the question, but the last conversation he had was with Beth, and it was about whether a dinosaur toy was a choking hazard.

“It’s Pokémon Go,” he said.

Daryl had apparently heard of it. “People still play that?” He shifted the weight of the trash bag to his other side.

“My kid does.”

It didn’t take Daryl long to think about that. They split another second of eye contact, and Daryl nodded. He understood. He went back on his way to the dumpster.

After that, Rick liked him okay. But he still missed Glenn.

Rick wasn’t the only one who missed him. After a few days of Glenn's absence, Maggie stopped with the not-subtle, fleeting glances back at the kitchen, and finally asked, “Where’s Glenn?”

“Who?” Rick was cleaning out the inside of a mug with a rag. “Oh, you mean Steven?”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

He got serious. “Let go.” He replaced the mug on the rack and picked up another one.

“For what?” she demanded, sounding very affronted for a girl who had never given Glenn the time of day.

“Some asshole came in, decided he wanted to start trouble.”

“Should have thrown him out,” grunted Daryl. He was wiping down mugs, too, but not well. Rick was double checking all of them. He had to remind Daryl, not for the first time, that,

“We’re baristas, not bouncers.”

Daryl gave a moody shrug.

“If that guy comes in here again,” said Maggie. “Give me a sign. I’m going to spill my coffee on him.” For all her professionalism, her dark blazer that said ‘I work at a place that does not practice casual Fridays’, Rick didn’t doubt she would do it.

“I don’t think he’ll be back,” said Rick, checking the last of the mugs for dirt specks.

He should have been so lucky.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welcome to our newest cast member


	6. Machamp

It was the slow part of the day, between the lunch hour and the four to six o’clock exodus, when Daryl was doing whatever Daryl did in the back, Rick had cleared the tables, and Glenn could afford to abandon his textbooks and come hang out behind the counter to compare pokémon.

“How do you have Lunatone? _I_ don’t even have Lunatone yet. They just switched regions.”

“Because I’m just better at this than you,” said Rick, who didn’t know what any of that meant, only that he had caught the crescent moon shaped pokémon on one especially insomniatic night, holding his fussy daughter and flicking pokéballs at whatever appeared in their backyard until she slipped back to sleep.

“Ha, ha,” said Glenn. “We really need to get you leveled up though, you’re only level four. Once you hit five we can start doing raids, those are the best way to gain exp.” He pronounced the word like _'ex-P'_ , exactly the way Carl did.

“No, it’s not.”

They both looked up. Maggie stood there with her usual list of coffee orders in hand, looking at them with a loftiness that might have been covering embarrassment. “You want to collect a lot of easy to evolve Pokémon, like Weedle and Pidgey, activate a Lucky Egg, and then evolve them all at once." When they stared, she elaborated, like explaining to a child. "Evolving Pokémon is the best way to gain experience. The Lucky Egg doubles that. You can get to level ten in a day if you use them right.”

Glenn’s jaw dropped. His surprise might have been because she was addressing him for the first time, or because he was finding out that the always-professional Maggie Greene played Pokemon Go, or maybe because she obviously knew the game better than he did.

Rick raised his eyebrows.

In their silence, Maggie turned a little red, and said, “Hello? Coffee?” She shoved the list at him, trying and failing to regain her early loftiness.

“You play Pokémon Go?” asked Glenn.

“Bethy—my sister wanted someone to play it with.”

Glenn opened his mouth. Never having said a word to her that wasn't related to a coffee order, he was pulling a blank.

Maggie took pity on him. “What team are you on?”

“Uh— Instinct?” He said it like it was a question.

“I’m on Mystic.”

“Oh.” A little disappointed.

“So’s Bethy.” She was almost apologetic.

“Oh.”

They were both pulling blanks now. Having broken the long silence, Maggie looked as shy of Glenn as he was of her. Rick, suppressing the hell out of his amusement, gave them a hand.

“Teams?” he prompted.

“Oh yeah, you uh, pick a team when you hit level five,” said Glenn. “The teams, they fight for control of gyms, stuff like that.”

“You should pick Mystic,” said Maggie. “Nobody really plays as Instinct, it’s impossible for them to hold a gym. No offense, Glenn.”

“None taken,” he said, his composure rapidly deteriorating. That was probably the first time she had ever said his name to his face. “It’s true. I put my Machamp in a gym at the parking garage an hour ago, it’s already been knocked out.”

“Well, that’s because you put a Machamp in a gym,” she said. “It’s a glass cannon.”

“A what?” asked Rick. But they had forgotten him completely.

“Don’t you have a Blissey?” she asked. “Or at least a Snorlax?”

“....no. I have a Gyarados?”

“Here, let me see your team.”

They started going through Glenn’s game, and Rick pretended not to notice the awkward way they exchanged and then avoided eye contact, how Glenn nearly dropped his phone when they accidentally touched hands, or how Maggie self consciously tucked her hair behind her ear. He smiled to himself and went back to making drinks.

The bell on the door jingled.

Rick didn’t look up. He didn’t even notice when Glenn and then Maggie fell silent. It was instinct that made him raise his head and stiffen, and turn.

Negan was leaning on the counter like he owned it. He hadn’t rung the bell next to the register. He had been waiting. Waiting for Rick to turn around and see him there.

Rick’s look must have been expressive, because Negan’s smile broadened.

“Hi,” he said.

“Back again,” said Rick shortly.

“I missed you,” said Negan. His eyes lingered on Rick for a minute, then abruptly he turned to Glenn. “Hey, didn’t I get you fired?”

Rick cut him off immediately, stepping in front of Glenn, who was blank. “He’s a paying customer. You have a problem with that, you can find another place to get your coffee.” He wasn’t just teetering on the edge of unprofessionalism, he was close to cutting himself on it, and he knew it. “Plenty of other coffee shops around here.”

“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong, Rick,” said Negan, once again over-pronouncing his name, relishing the hard K. “There may be other shops that sell coffee, but this little spot is unmatched, not just in atmosphere, but in its _impeccable_ customer service.” His grin said he was delighted at having gotten a rise so quickly. “Only _you_ can give me what I want.”

Glenn looked queasy. Maggie looked at Negan, incredulous, then at Rick, who was trying to keep a lid on his desire to do what Maggie had promised, and dash hot coffee on him. Why, out of all the shops he had mentioned, had this man picked this one? How had Rick earned this antagonism? He had no clue. All he knew was that he had to wrap this up before Daryl got back from his smoke break. Daryl would not respond to this man well. Rick had a mental image of him jumping the counter.

“There’s a line,” said Maggie, cold as Rick had ever heard her.

Negan’s eyebrows raised. He swiveled on his heel to face her, with the surprise of a man who wasn’t used to be interrupted.

“Well excuse the _hell_ out of me,” he said.

In the exaggerated manner of a gentleman, with a sweep of his arm, he stepped out of her way. "That was truly rude of me, I _do_ apologize." He grinned in the least apologetic way possible.

With nothing to object at, Maggie frowned through paying and collecting the drinks, each one lodged in a cardboard holder. She didn’t so much as glance at Negan even on her way out. He stowed his hands in his pockets and made a show of patiently waiting, even whistling, as he leaned back and took in the whole of the shop. Rick operated the whole time with tension in his shoulders. Glenn slunk back to his corner spot and eyed the scene warily from behind his laptop.

With Maggie gone, the coffee shop was cleared. There were a few people working on their laptops, but by and large, the mid afternoon lull dominated, and it was into this stillness that Negan returned to monopolize the counter space once more. With an air of ‘I’m going to be here a while’, he began looking over the fliers and pamphlets set out for various local artists and community events, not looking up. Rick stood and waited with a set jaw.

Negan selected one of the empty punch cards (the kind that promised returning customers a free drink after ten punches) and put it down. A promise. And then he waited. He waited, still whistling, for Rick to pluck up his customer service voice and grovel.

That rankled.

_Think of Carl,_ Rick told himself. _What would he learn, if he were watching you right now?_

“You pick this music?” asked Negan, pointing up at the speakers.

The mix that was playing was called ‘Jazz and Bossa Nova, Cafe Music’, and Rick had taken it off of YouTube, because he had run out of old Glenn playlists to recycle.

“Yeah,” he said.

“It’s very romantic.”

Rick didn’t say anything.

“Are you a romantic, Rick?”

Not for a long time. Not since before Lori’s death.

He thought about that, sometimes. Thought about how he should have surprised her with more flowers, got her more jewelry. But Lori had never cared about that sort of thing. It had always been the little stuff she valued. Waking up late on a weekend, rolling over on the pillow to make eye contact, just saying “Hi,”, and both of them laying there silently sharing those morning rays in what little peace they had. Things like that. They hadn’t had many of those mornings in the months before he lost her.

“Not really,” he said.

Negan lifted his hand pointed to his ring finger, single ladies style, indicating the wedding band that Rick still wore.

“Lucky lady,” he said.

“She’s dead,” said Rick.

“Well shit.” Negan dropped his hand. “Shit, I am sorry.” He actually sounded sincere, if unfazed.

Rick realized that was the first time he had spoken about her in at least a month. Even among the small group of people he actually liked speaking to, he hardly talked to anyone about it. Least of all Carl. He didn't know how Lori had always understood Carl better—maybe that was a mom thing. He and Carl hadn’t just lost her as wife, as mom, Rick was realizing lately, but as their translator.

Negan was watching his face intently. He waited until he had Rick’s attention, then pointed at his ring finger the same way. “Only took me a week before I took mine off,” he said. “Who needs the constant reminder, right?”

Rick stared at him.

“What’s the point? Not like you’re going to forget it.”

Rick didn’t know how to respond to that. He felt simultaneously repulsed and understood.

“Been a few years,” said Negan.

“Six months.”

“Damn, that’s fresh.” Again, no sympathy. Just rapport. “Any kids?” The man was as keen as a razor, cutting right through convention to prod raw places.

“Two,” said Rick. The mention of his children pricked him a little, made him remember who he was talking to, and how much he wanted him out the door. He picked up one of their laminated menus and tossed it on the counter between them. “I assume you’re here because you want something.” His voice suggested Negan get to the point or get out.

“Well, I was gonna ask for your number, but that seems tasteless now.” Negan rubbed his stubbly chin, grinned at him, and, without looking, tapped on one of the specialty drinks- Banana Pancake. A latte with four different flavors in it. Banana, butter pecan, caramel, and dark chocolate. One of Glenn’s inventions. “But widowed with kids… that’s a lot. How old?” Negan barely let him grab a cup before he delved again.

“Fifteen, and six months.” Rick made the drink as quickly as he could, wondering what the hell Glenn was thinking as he searched for all four syrups. Did they even have butter pecan?

“Jesus,” said Negan. “That must be hell on earth.” He was grinning still, leaning over to watch Rick, who, unfortunately, had to bend over in search of the butter pecan. “We never had kids, but I worked with ‘em. Fifteen... tough age. What are fifteen year olds into, these days?”

Rick found the syrup, added the shots and wondered that himself. What Carl was into seemed to change day by day. His closet was a graveyard of hobbies. “Comics. Video games. He plays that pokémon go game.”

“Pokémon Go?”

“Yeah, it's this game for your phone—” Rick was about to explain when he looked up. Negan was pulling out his phone.

_No._

Negan turned the screen to him. There it was: the blue and green world of Pokémon Go, with the coffee shop pokéstop front and center. On the bottom left was an avatar, and beside that, was the player's level.

Level 40.


	7. Valor

Level 40.

Rick hadn’t realized there were so many levels.

If anyone else, if Glenn had showed him, ‘look, I’m level 40!’, he would have said ‘That’s nice, Glenn,’ and under his congratulations be silently mystified about what an adult man got out of working so hard for an imaginary victory over imaginary creatures.

Rick didn’t know what the hell level 40 meant about this man’s psyche, but it was a chilling contrast to the rest of his vibe.

“I know, I know,” said Negan. “What’s a grown man doing playing a game like that, right?”

Rick didn’t say anything. He definitely didn’t say he was in no position to judge.

“See this?” Negan expanded the view on his screen, zooming out until the whole overlay of the neighborhood was visible, all the streets, the nearby park, the little blips that were gyms, and pokéstops. “You see all this?” said Negan. “To your average Joe, just walking down the street, what do you think he sees?”

He stared Rick down until he was forced to engage.

“Buildings.”

“That’s right, Rick.” He smiled. “ _Buildings._ Just buildings. Our average Joe doesn’t know the truth… that there’s a war going on. That there are winners, and there are losers.” He selected a gym, showed a row of pokémons. “Some people take gyms… I keep them. This whole neighborhood, this whole part of mine… I own it. Every stop. Every gym. I own _all_ of it. I may as well own this coffee shop, Rick. I may as well own _you_.” That ugliness came over his face again, that aggression that presented itself as fact, and him as the minister of all truth, under pain of violence.

Rick blinked rapidly. Negan was watching him, rapt for a reaction.

The Rick of seven months ago would have been confused, close to cowed. But he wasn’t that man anymore.

“We’ll see about that,” he said evenly.

Negan’s gaze flicked from his one eye to the other, took in every speck of color, the pupils narrowed to tiny effectless pinpricks.

“Damn,” he said, admiring. “Ice cold.” The smile crept out from behind the dangerous look—though the smile didn’t feel much safer. He took his coffee, raised it to his lips, and took a sip without breaking eye contact.

Rick rattled the tip jar. “What about a tip?”

“A tip?”

Negan fished in his breast pocket, pulled out a business card, and dropped it in the jar.

“Tell you what, Rick. You want that _tip_ so badly… you call me.”

—

He went home in a mood.

Traffic was backed up, and he was already late ending his shift, because Daryl Dixon had to bail, or go bail out his brother. It was hard to catch the meaning in his mumble as he took his leave. That meant Rick had to call home and say he wasn’t going to make it home for dinner.

Carl picked up on the third ring, so Rick only had two minor heart palpitations, two mental images of kids in the hospital and house empty. An unanswered phone had been his nightmare since Lori.

Carl picked up. “Hello.”

“It’s me.”

“Gonna be late?” guessed Carl, before Rick could say anything. Carl sounded unsurprised. Disinterested.

“Yeah.”

“I figured,” said Carl. “I fed Judith.”

Rick could hear her babbling gently in the background. He felt a pang. He should have been there. He was missing so much of it. It was bad enough that Lori had to miss it.

“Want me to pick up a pizza on my way home?”

“That’s okay," said Carl. "There’s still leftover spaghetti.”

Rich’s already low dad self esteem plummeted. Rationally, he knew that Carl was being responsible, that he had school in the morning and didn’t have time to wait up, but to Rick’s ears, it definitely sounded like ‘I’d rather eat cold spaghetti than pizza if it means having to spend ten minutes with you’.

“Okay,” said Rick.

They hung up, and he focused on traffic, and caught pokemon at red lights until his eyes glazed over.

—

Rick pulled into the driveway, parked, and turned off the engine. He sat there. His eyes still held the afterimage of the road, except now the headlights were replaced by his porchlight, and the light coming out their kitchen window. The street was quiet except for the cicadas. It was a quiet neighborhood, full of normal families, with two parents, who worked 9 to 5 and were always home in time for supper. They were probably all in bed by now.

He glanced at his reflection in the rearview, took in the bloodshot eyes and scrubby beard, and realized he had forgotten to remove his nametag.

He pulled it off and tossed it on the passenger seat.

Somebody tapped on his window.

He jumped probably more than was reasonable, his nerves already shot and the caffeine not helping. He looked over, and it was Glenn. Waving in the window at him.

Rick got out, shut the driver’s door , and failed to take in the significance of Glenn’s red shirt and cap. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Got a new job, remember?” said Glenn. He hefted an empty black bag. “Delivering pizzas.”

Rick stared at him. “I didn’t order any pizzas,” he said.

“Yeah, no shit. Next time you leave Carl pizza money, make sure you include a tip.”

Glenn gave him a jaunty wave and went back to his car, which Rick should have seen parked a house down, a dinky thing with a delivery place topper on it. Rick looked on, befuddled, until Glenn drove off. He honked the horn once good-bye as he passed.

Rick went inside.

In was dark in most of the house. He followed the light into the kitchen, blinking as he entered, dropping his keys into their little bowl by the fridge.

“Why didn’t you tell me Glenn got fired?” Carl was pulling out paper plates and putting one down on either side of the pizza box.

Rick just stopped and stared for a moment, tapping his finger on his leg. “He told you about that, huh?”

“He said some asshole—”

“Language.”

“Well that’s what he said, dad.”

Rick pointed at the pizza. “I thought you didn’t want any?”

“You sounded bummed on the phone,” said Carl. “I thought maybe you needed it.” He sat down and flipped open the box. He looked up at his dad, standing staring blankly at him. “I’m gonna have some even if you just stand there,” Carl said pointedly. “There’s cheese bread, too. I was thinking, though… isn’t that kind of redundant?”

Rick felt himself beginning to smile. He took a seat at the table and pulled the plate towards him. “Redundant?”

“Isn’t cheese bread just… pizza? Just without the sauce?” Carl put a piece on his plate but didn’t take a bite right away, looking quizzical.

“I would think,” said Rick, taking two conjoined pieces. “That that’s the key difference.”

“But you can order pizza without sauce.” Carl was taking this more seriously than his last paper assignment. "If you can have pizza without the sauce, isn't that just a giant cheese bread? And if you dip the cheese bread in the pizza sauce... isn't that just like, deconstructed pizza? It's all the same ingredients."

“Maybe you should ask Glenn. This is more his area of expertise.” Rick suddenly realized he was ravenous. He hadn’t had much more than coffee and a mini quiche all day.

“Did you know Glenn plays Pokémon Go?” Carl’s voice was slightly muffled by a mouthful of cheese bread.

“Does he now?” Rick played it mum.

“I _told_ you other people play it. I’m higher level than him, though.”

Rick stayed as casual as possible. “Yeah? What level are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“What’s the highest level?” Rick had his suspicions.

“Forty.”

“Ah.” He masked his grimace. “Actually, Glenn was talking to me about it. He says there are teams?”

Like any kid enthusiastic about a weird hobby, Carl was happy to go into detail. “Okay, so, there are three teams. They mostly compete for gym space, stuff like that. It’s okay, you don’t have to know what that means." Rick let Carl assume that he didn't. "There’s Instinct, which is the yellow team, and basically nobody plays as them. They’re kind of like the loser team, or like, if you want to play as ‘hard mode’ because you don’t have any team advantages.”

“Okay,” said Rick.

“The blue team is Mystic. That’s for people who like to analyze things. Figure out gameplay. That kind of stuff.”

It sounded like Maggie and Glenn had picked their teams appropriately. “What’s the third team?”

“That’s the red team, Valor. That’s the hardcore team. It’s about being strong.”

Rick had a guess, but he asked anyway. “Which team are you on?”

“Valor.”

He’d been right. He suppressed that smile, too, maintaining his facade of benign daddish confusion. “Are you winning?”

He got what he’d been hoping for: an exasperated look and a silent teenage headshake of ‘you don’t get it’. “That’s not really how it works,” said Carl.

Rick smiled and dug into the pizza. They ate mostly in silence, except for the occasional crackle from Judith’s baby monitor. If he didn’t think too hard about it, he could pretend this was how it had always been. He let himself forget about his day. When they eventually finished eating and packed the scraps away in the fridge, vanquished to join the spaghetti and moldy forgotten tupperware containers, when Carl had gone to bed and Rick had checked on Judith, he finally lay in bed feeling almost peaceful.

He knew he had a whole day ahead of him, and after that, another day, and more days after that, but the weight of those days didn’t loom quite as much as they had earlier. He wondered idly if he could get Daryl to play Pokémon Go. He was beginning to enjoy the game more, and missed comparing his collection of pokémons with Glenn every morning. He was even starting to be curious about the other elements of the game: gyms. Badges. Raids.

Especially now that he knew which team to pick.


	8. Slaking

“It’s fine.”

Daryl didn’t say anything.

“Seriously, it’s fine.” Rick reached over and turned on the radio, keeping it low. He tried to be lighthearted. “This is good practice for when Carl starts sneaking beers behind my back or gets picked up for destroying public property. He broke all four windows on his principal’s car bout a week ago. Hell, that’s worse than…?”

“Suspended license,” said Daryl defensively. His embarrassment was still raw. Rick had barely been able to understand him on the phone. Daryl wasn’t a clear speaker at the best of times, and moreso when he was ashamed, and at 3 AM, when Rick wasn’t fully awake, and the connection with the county jail phone was fuzzy. It had taken him a few minutes to realize who was calling him and why.

Rick liked to think he was a good person. He tried to be, for Carl’s sake.

But the truth was, when Daryl called him from the county jail, having no one else in the world to bail him out, Rick’s first thought had not been to help out of the goodness of his heart.

His first thought had been, ‘I am not going through the morning rush by myself one more goddamn day.’

On the bright side, the mural on the wall next to the police station was a Pokéstop. Sitting in his car at 3:30 AM, opening the game as had become a compulsion, spinning that stop had boosted Rick the final bit of ‘ex-P’ he needed to reach level 5, and join Carl on Team Valor.

The cheer from that hadn’t lasted long after Daryl got in his car, bringing the cloud of shame with him.

They went through a drive through and sat in the car eating burgers, mostly in silence. Rick tried to pick out details. He was in that tricky area between not wanting to pry into other people’s business, and _What the hell, he did wake me up to bail him out at 3 in the morning, I’ll ask whatever I want._

“What about your brother—Merle?”

Daryl’s face said he shouldn’t have asked.

“Got picked up again a week ago,” he said shortly. “Parole violation.”

Rick nodded without saying anything. They sat in silence for a minute, eating, before he double checked. “Car impounded?”

“Mm hm.”

Not knowing if he was doing himself or Daryl the favor, Rick suggested, “You know, I can give you a ride in the mornings. I drive past here anyway.”

‘Here’ was a not so nice house in a not so nice part of town, and he did _not_ drive by there, but he _did_ sometimes stop at a park that was only a few more blocks away, because the park had five pokéstops he could reach from his car. Sometimes interesting pokémons spawned there.

“You don’t gotta,” said Daryl. “I can figure something out.”

Rick felt like he was helping Carl with his homework.

“It’s no problem,” he said.

“I can help with gas,” said Daryl, or that’s what it sounded like he said, while gnawing on a nail and staring out the window. He looked more uncomfortable riding shotgun in Lori’s old minivan than he had at the police station.

“Tell you what,” said Rick. “Keep your gas money. But you can do me another favor.”

—

That favor kicked in at 10:30, in that sweet spot between the morning rush and lunch swarm. There was a lull punctuated only by a few red-faced commuters who had slept in, speeding through for their coffee and sprinting off to hopefully avoid an asskicking. Daryl agreed to hold the fort, and Rick, who was finally the level that allowed him to interact with Pokémon gyms, took off to go fight some battles.

Well, lose some battles.

The process of fighting in gyms was not outwardly complicated. The gyms, like Pokéstops, sat on top of physical landmarks, like a sculpture or historically relevant bit of architecture. 'Points of interest', Glenn had called then. In this case, the point of interest was a big clock on the side of a parking garage. The gyms all showed as red, blue, or yellow depending on which team had control of them. This gym was controlled by blue. That was… Mystic? Maggie’s team. He wondered if one of the pokémon in here was hers.

Each gym held a certain number of pokémon placed in it by a different player. According to Glenn, each type of pokémon had a different type of strength or weakness that you had to keep in mind when battling them.

Rick did not keep those strengths or weakness in mind, because he did not know them.

Figuring that you could get just about anything done with enough endurance, and wasn’t this a kid’s game anyway?, he stood beneath the parking garage clock, opened the gym, and started tapping on pokémon to fight them.

It wasn’t complicated. Tap on the gym. Tap on the battle button. Tap on the button to make your pokémon fight. Keep tapping.

Problem was, his pokémon kept dying. Even his carefully evolved weedles.

Rick had lost most of the shame and self consciousness of playing the game in public. Unless someone was looking directly at his screen, they couldn’t tell what he was doing. He might as well have been texting. But the longer he stood there, tapping on the same spot over and over again, the more awkward he felt standing beneath the huge clock and its invisible gym. Was this really how he wanted to use his precious break time? Was this really how he wanted to leverage his favor from Daryl?

Yes.

The part of him that was sick of steaming milk and pulling shots, sick of commuting in the dark, sick of sleeping alone and waking up alone, sick of feeling defeated by every coffee stain and every shadow under his eye, dug in its heels and refused to entertain the thought of surrender. Not to some stupid game.

He should have listened to the game’s warning to stay aware of his surroundings.

“Well, if it isn’t my favorite barista.”

The base of his spine went rigid, and Rick’s head ticced sideways before he could even look up from his phone.

_No._

Yes.

He turned, and there was Negan waltzing towards him, wearing that free, full, mean-spirited smile. He had his leather jacket off and slung over his shoulder, looking very Men’s Health cover. In one hand he had a big fat iced coffee, and in the other, he had out his phone. As usual, Rick’s open dislike only seemed to to give air to Negan’s sails. “Talk about if looks could kill,” said Negan, almost affectionately. “Here I thought you were hiding in the back avoiding me. I should have known better — you’d never resort to something that childish, right?”

Before Rick could say anything, Negan's gaze had gotten halfway through his lecherous up and down, and zeroed in on his phone. His eyes flicked from the phone to the parking garage clock, back down to the phone, and narrowed.

“You have _got_ to be shittin’ me.”

He swiped the phone out of Rick’s hand before he could react. Rick could see a new and inventive light sparkling in Negan’s eyes as he dangled the phone out of reach.

“Pokémon Go,” said Negan, looking like it was Christmas and his birthday at the same time. “ _Really?_ And here I could have sworn you were judging me in silence. I didn’t realize we had so much in common.” He practically batted his eyelashes. “Except…” He was scrolling through Rick’s list of pokémon, looking more disappointed and even pitying as he went along. “Jesus. How long have you been playing, an hour? You don’t have a single smackdown Tyranitar, no legendaries, your single Machamp is a crap IV...” He skimmed more and more dismissively. “Did you use everything trying to take this gym down? Doesn’t look like you made a dent.”

“Are you done?” said Rick. His voice was, before he could help it, threatening and nasty as hell.

Negan looked up from the phone with some automatic tic of anger in his eyes, the flash of a man who didn’t like to be interrupted or have his dominance questioned. But he smiled at Rick’s expression. The more murder was in Rick's eyes, the more he seemed to like him.

“Helluva mean mug.” He held the phone out to him. “You want in?”

“Excuse me?” Rick reached for the phone, but Negan held onto it. Just barely. Just enough to resist giving it up.

“The gym,” said Negan. "You want a spot?" He grinned wider at the aggravation on Rick’s face, finally let go of the phone, and held up both hands in the classic ‘I’m harmless’ gesture. “I get it,” he said. “Your kid, right?”

Rick didn’t say anything, knowing there was confirmation in his face, and that Negan saw it. He nodded.

“I never had the balls to be a dad,” said Negan. “Well.” Grin. “I had the _balls_.” He held up his own phone again. “But it’s one thing to shoot your load, whole other ballgame to have and raise that kid. That is one shitstorm I have never felt the particular need to attend. And hell, nobody’s ever invited me to it.” Holding up a finger for patience, Negan pulled up the gym, and made him a promise. “Let me do you a favor, Rick. Non-dad to dad. Just one minute.”

And in just a minute, the entirety of the pokémon in the gym, the Blisseys and Snorlaxes that had defied Rick, were decimated. One by one, they blipped off of Rick’s screen. And then they were all gone. The gym, which had been blue, shrunk on the screen and turned gray.

Empty.

“All yours,” said Negan.

Rick tapped the button to add a pokemon, dropped in the Lunatone Glenn had coveted, and just like that, the gym turned red.

Taken.

A moment later, another pokémon dropped into the gym next to his. It was a Slaking, an ape looking thing, with the highest level he had ever seen on a pokeémon in a gym. His own Lunatone sat at a measly 821. This thing was 4600. The name of its owner showed next to it: _KingSavior_.

“There ya go,” said Negan. “You’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” said Rick, feeling forced, but also obligated on a more internal, personal level. There was something important about this game. It was important that he be good at it, be good at something that Carl cared so much about. He wondered how long it would take him to be able to wipe out whole gyms like Negan had just done. He wondered how long it would take to be a strong enough level to take them down with Carl. He was grateful. And he hated it.

“Don’t mention it,” said Negan, with a smile that said he wasn’t going to forget this, and was almost definitely going to mention it himself. “First one’s a freebie. Next time… well, we’ll have to work out a system.” He clapped Rick on the shoulder. It was a friendly gesture that hung a little too long and gripped a little too hard, and resisted Rick's half-hearted attempt to shrug it off. “After all, we are on the same team.” Negan took in Rick’s discomfort with relish, then released him, pocketing his phone and tugging his jacket back on.

“And no worries,” said Negan, taking a final glance up at the parking garage clock. That strange look passed over his face. That hard, dangerous one. “If somebody comes along and tries to take back the gym… I’ll crush them all over again.”


End file.
